Audit of the FFF: what the inspectors hold against Noël Le Graët

This is a highly anticipated report, which will undoubtedly seal the fate of Noël Le Graët. On Wednesday February 15, the three inspectors from the General Inspectorate for Education, Sport and Research (IGESR), in charge of the audit of the French Football Federation (FFF), must submit their final conclusions to the Minister of Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra.

The provisional version of this report has already leaked to the press, but it was expurgated of the specific facts alleged against Noël Le Graët, who was suspended from his duties as boss of the FFF on January 11. According to our information, since the start of the mission in October 2022, the inspectors have interviewed 103 people, including employees and former employees of the FFF. And they retained the following alleged facts:

– Text messages indicating for example “good evening without me!!!!”

– An explicit request to a young woman to wear a skirt to travel.

– A repeated caress of the thigh of a young woman during a trip when she was asked to stop.

– The sending of two successive vocal invitation messages, the second specifying:“Jam on my third bottle (…); I expect you for the fourth”.

– The explicit proposal “a threesome” during a dinner surrounded by two collaborators.

– The invitation of a young woman to his home to discuss projects, suggesting that a third person was invited when he had knowingly organized a one-on-one.

Facts not “pretty pretty”

Most of the women who testified to the audit mission had already given their testimony to the press on condition of anonymity. The investigation unit of Radio France had met them in particular and shared their experiences last October. “Testifying in front of the inspectors is going further, for things to change”, one of them told us after her audition, believing that the FFF was a benchmark for “old gentlemen”. “It’s up to the State to take over”, another told us, judging that Noël Le Graët had “practices from another time”. A former FFF executive believes that the facts described are not “pretty pretty”. But he considers that“there is nothing to go to criminal”.

It will be up to the courts to decide, the Paris prosecutor’s office having opened an investigation on January 16 against the boss of the FFF for “moral and sexual harassment”, following the report issued by the IGESR. In the meantime, the lawyers of Noël Le Graët, who received the provisional report on January 30, have until Monday to inform the inspectors of their observations. They have already denounced in a statement “a report that looks like an indictment”. “The virulence of the words used with regard to Mr. Le Graët is surprising in view of the emptiness of its factual basis, which is based on truncated and anonymous elements and testimonies”write Maîtres Florence Bourg and Thierry Marembert.

“The repetitive nature” of the actions

It is true that the inspectors did not go there with a dead hand. According to our information, in the unredacted version of the report of which we have knowledge, they fall “the repetitive nature of Noël Le Graët’s actions”. They add : “These actions may have undermined the dignity of the victims through vulgar remarks, in particular when Mr. Le Graët shows tangible signs that he is under the influence of alcohol.” The inspectors note that the employees had “a coded formula” to find out if Noël Le Graët was drunk, which consisted of asking: “Did the President have lunch?”. And they specify that “in a state of inebriation, the insulting remarks of Mr. Le Graët can concern men as well as women”.

The authors of the report also accuse the president of the FFF of having “a fully thought-out strategy“. “The mission indeed notes a small number of writings (SMS in particular) produced by Mr. Le Graët, using ambiguous formulations which can receive different interpretations and a vocabulary containing no term of a sexual nature, but whose dispatch times, the repetitive character and the nature of the recipients caught the attention of the mission.”

The mission is also offended that after the first hearing of the boss of the FFF on October 13, 2022, “Mr. Le Graët continued to issue invitations to an international player, member of the France football team, as if the ongoing investigation did not change a common practice in any way”. At the conclusion of the chapter concerning the president of the FFF set back, the mission writes that the latter “given his behavior towards women, his public statements and the failures of the governance of the FFF, (he) no longer has the necessary legitimacy to administer and represent French football”.

The ex-director also implicated

More generally, beyond the single person of Mr. Le Graët, the mission considers that there reigned within the FFF an atmosphere “violent” And “sexist”. The director general of the FFF, Florence Hardouin, with whom Noël Le Graët maintains notoriously execrable relations, is not exempt from any reproach, affirm the authors of the report. “The passivity of the general manager (…) marked the people present at the time”they write. “Some directors even mention a form of complicity on the part of the general manager with the authors of sexist or violent words”. Also pinned for her “misplaced authoritarianismFlorence Hardouin was laid off as a precaution by the executive committee of the FFF on January 11 and was called to an interview prior to a possible dismissal on February 21.

The audit report will be submitted in the middle of next week to the Minister of Sports. What will happen next? The executive committee will study the content and adopt a common position during an extraordinary meeting. Then it will be the moment of truth.

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